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Have you ever been accused of being judgmental? The accuser usually has flung the “judgment” handle as a reflex. Teased apart, the accuser usually means to say; “Yikes, that hit a bit close to home.”

Calling people judgmental, and meaning it as an insult, is a new phenomenon. The antipathy of judgment seems to have cropped up in that organic garden which has also sprouted trophies for every player and honor student bumper stickers. Everyone is above average! Now clearly, in our most logical moments we can all agree that to be a force for good in the world you need to have judgment. I don’t think the casual bon mots of “don’t judge me!” “you’re so judgmental!” are really meant as the rallying cry of a movement. No thinking person actually would posit that humans are meant to go through life NOT processing information coming into their senses. I suspect these cries are more of the “I’m too fragile to process your opinion” ilk.

What’s stunning about this development is that it seems to have happened during the cruelest of trends in entertainment and media. How many television and radio shows, have ridicule as their raison d’etre? How many magazine and newspaper articles are at their core, simply picking on people. A governor’s weight is made fun of in the news cycle! And lo, what the internet has wrought. Websites dedicated to the fine art of snark. Quasi-anonymous (they need to use catchy handles, so you know whom to consider pithy) posters, take an obvious glee in simply maligning others. They are like an uncontrolled infection, leaping from opportunity to opportunity. Few people, excluding shock jocks and cable news pundits, would ever spew the venom they do.

We, the spectator, are not much better. We watch, with glee; the accidents, the vulgar child-killer trials, the reality shows, the talk shows. It is our appetite for some bastardized form of schadenfreude that drives us to “Addiction” “Intervention” “Hoarding.” We watch these shows because they are the ultimate judgment. “You there on the television, you are not normal.” We have a voracious appetite for ridicule when it serves our purposes. But when judgment is not for entertainment purposes? Or not cruel, but instead, instructive? That’s just too harsh.

Truth is, critique is only welcome if it is in the abstract (film, theatre, television, restaurant reviews) or about others. But in real life? All finger paintings are works of genius.